by Susan Choi
Sarah wound up seated opposite Karen. Liam, beside Sarah, sat opposite Martin, consumed by his role as Martin’s foil, co-conspirator, and jester. “D’you know Liam used to have fatal stage fright?” Martin was telling Karen. “D’you know I used to have to tell him to bring extra pants on the nights he performed?”
“He liked to see me play dress-up,” said Liam.
“In case of accidents.”
“D’you mean like that time you zipped your willy, Martin? Don’t worry, Karen, it caused only minor deformity.”
“I’ll cause you a minor deformity!”
Neither Sarah nor Karen could compete with this, nor were they invited. But Karen needed only to train her attention on Martin. He’d cast her in the role of watching him, as he’d cast Liam in his multiple roles, and Sarah in her part as a sort of wordless prop by which Martin could give Liam occasional scoldings. “Poor Sarah’s bored stiff!” Martin said. “She’s going to be wondering why she came out with us instead of having all the great wicked fun she had planned.”
“I was just going to pick up my mom,” Sarah began.
“Devoted to her mum, just like you, Liam, and yet it’s me discovering these points in common. Why aren’t you getting to know each other? Do I have to do everything?”
Wit, or what passed for it; a nimbleness of insults and baffling allusions; the quick pivot, the cavalier non sequitur, the comically extreme reaction. Sarah had always imagined herself possessed of such talents. Hadn’t she been a lunch-hour intimate of Mr. Kingsley’s? But Martin’s conversational virtuosity—or perhaps his unremitting energy for dominating social situations—overmatched her completely. She became quiet and even stupid in its presence. She tried to lay hold of Karen’s passive spectatorship, which seemed, at least in the moment, to possess more dignity than her own tentativeness, but Karen’s refusal to meet her eyes, to acknowledge her presence, to in any way admit her into comradeship, seemed to deny her Karen’s manner toward Martin and Liam as well. Since becoming a student at CAPA, Sarah often had the classic nightmare of finding herself about to go onstage without knowing her lines, or even her role, or even the play, and though this situation lacked the abject terror of those dreams it was similarly paralyzing.
Although Sarah also spoke, laughed, ate half a club sandwich, even flirted with Liam—at least, had she been watching herself from a neighboring table it would have appeared that she did all these things. They had arrived at the Big Boy around five and now it was almost seven. “Crikey, we have shopping to do,” Martin said. “Come along, come along. What did you tell people, Liam? Seven thirty or eight?”
“I don’t know,” Liam said. “I think I just said after seven.”
“You’re such a complete imbecile, or perhaps you’re a dreamer, a beautiful dreamer, and we’re all your beautiful dream.”
“Why d’you look so much like my worst nightmare, then?”
“D’you ever have that nightmare,” Sarah tried, “where you’re in a play, but you never rehearsed, and you don’t even know what play it is?” She’d done the thing she most despised, of attempting to parrot their accent. Mustering the strength to speak words, she couldn’t even use her own voice.
“Yes!” Liam was shouting, as if she’d guessed the answer to a lucrative riddle. “All the bloody time! That’s my worst nightmare!”
“Another remarkable point in common. There you go, Sarah, you’re drawing him out. I think you two ought to do the drinks shopping and Karen and I will do snacks, but don’t take all night. We’re already late and we don’t even know if we’re late for seven thirty or eight due to Liam’s remarkable idiocy.”
“Where are we going?” Sarah asked Liam once they were alone, cleaving the arctic glare of the supermarket with the rattling cart preceding them as if they were a young couple pushing a “pram.” Separated from Martin, Liam had grown quiet, and intently attentive to her, and correspondingly handsome; he watched her push the cart as if enthralled. For a moment, after she spoke, he seemed to study her words on the plate of his mind, as if unsure how to consume them.
“To our place,” he said.
“You mean—Mr. Kingsley’s?”
“Yes. Jim’s place. And Tim’s. Mustn’t forget Tim. Tim and Jim, Jim and Tim. D’you think they fancied each other because their names rhyme? And they wear the same size trousers.” Liam giggled, exposing his compromised teeth—if only he would keep his mouth shut.
“I didn’t know they were having a party.”
“Is this a lager you like? We should get one of these big—boxes—Martin loves big American things—”
She understood for the first time that they were buying alcohol. “Do you have an ID? That proves that you’re over eighteen?”
“You think they’ll ask me to prove that I’m over eighteen?” Liam giggled again, perhaps at the thought of being mistaken for a minor—yet he had come here, with Martin’s troupe, as a sort of honorary high school student. Didn’t he think he resembled one? But he didn’t, Sarah realized. Beneath the unforgiving grocery store lights, his skin was slightly worn, the corners of his eyes slightly creased. Or perhaps it was not the store’s fluorescence, but the absence of Martin as a point of comparison, that made Liam’s age abruptly visible. Either way, Liam said, as if he knew her thoughts, “It doesn’t matter. Martin will pay, and there’s no mistaking him for a kid.”
“How old is he?” Of course she knew he was older—the teacher’s imprecisely superior age—but how much older she’d never been able to guess. She could not match him, agewise, to the other adults in her life.
“How old is Martin? He’s bloody forty, isn’t he? Old wanker.” This was said with fondness. To cover her surprise Sarah wheeled the cart into a reckless U-turn now that it was heavy with Miller High Life and Bartles & Jaymes. Forty was much older than she’d thought, though she wasn’t sure what she had thought, nor how this contradiction of what she had thought made her feel.
At the register Martin paid for the beer, wine, potato chips, and pretzels while Sarah, Karen, and Liam slunk out of the store as if they didn’t know him. Barks of laughter—Martin’s—and an unintelligible volubility—the cashier’s—followed them through the automatic doors, which slid shut and then jerked open again for Martin, pushing the juddering cart. “Is everyone in this country a ponce?” he asked as he plowed the cart across the lot toward Karen’s car. “I’ve never met so many poofters in my life. Teaching at your school, waiting tables at that burger restaurant, ringing me up at the grocer’s—”
“It’s the neighborhood.” Sarah cut him off. Something in Martin’s comment provoked a warning sharpness in her own reply, but as soon as she heard it, she faltered. “This is the gay neighborhood,” she clarified, and now she sounded apologetic. “I mean, not just gay—it’s the arts neighborhood, but it’s where lots of gay people live. It’s the fourth-largest gay neighborhood in the country,” she unaccountably added, “after New York, San Francisco, and—I’m not sure of the third.”
“Buggering Batman, Liam. Sarah here seems to specialize in Sodomitica. How did you know, Sarah, that sort of thing’s right up his alley?”
“My cousin’s gay. He used to live in this neighborhood,” Sarah said, uncomprehending and unheard, as Liam, having leaped on Martin’s back and snatched off his glasses, howled and waved the glasses in the air while Martin spun himself and Liam like a top, hugely waving his arms to emphasize his vision impairment. Unassisted, Karen unloaded the grocery cart into the VW’s under-hood trunk.
“Did your mummies know your school’s in America’s fourth-largest gayborhood? Mind my specs, Liam, you’re going to break them.”
“Did you know, Martin? I’ll bet you did. And you told me I wouldn’t need my arse helmet.”
All the way to Mr. Kingsley’s they kept it up, though neither could entirely out-shout the VW’s plosively stuttering engine. It brought a din as of German invasion to the crepuscular, secretive streets of Mr. Kingsley’s neighborhood, the st
rangely underwater world into which one passed instantly upon turning off the garishly lit boulevard. It was a noiseless foreign world of boundless lawns upholstered in shadow on which globes of live oak and azalea floated like ships. Karen’s unmufflered vehicle tore through it contemptuously, and Sarah could already see Mr. Kingsley standing at the hem of his own velvet lawn, eyeing their approach with his fists on his hips and that expression Sarah most feared, of unsurprised distaste, on his face. But as they came around the bend that revealed his house there was no Mr. Kingsley, only several familiar cars at the curb. One was Joelle’s. One was David’s. Karen parked her car in front of David’s.
As she stood out of the driver’s seat, Karen looked directly at Sarah for the first time all night. Not in friendship, but in cold inquiry. Sarah knew Karen wanted to see David’s car inflicting on Sarah whatever soft violence an unmoving car can inflict. “Aren’t you coming in?” Karen said. Martin and Liam hastily routed the booze and snacks from the under-hood trunk and disappeared around the side of the house toward the enchanted forest of Mr. Kingsley’s backyard, with its deck and pergola and fairy lights. Sarah gazed forward yet she could see David’s car through the back of her head, could see the ghosts of David and herself entwined like snakes in its dusky interior.
“Are you dating him or something?” Sarah asked about Martin, as much to banish her own thoughts as to deflect Karen’s question.
Karen stepped away from the car and slammed the door, which left Sarah having to lever the driver’s seat forward and reopen the door for herself, or climb out the open top. Either option would make her look like a clumsy fool and so she stayed in the car and returned Karen’s unfriendly gaze.
“‘Dating’?” Karen smirked. “We’re just hanging out.”
“Your mom must love you hanging out with some forty-year-old guy from England,” Sarah said, hoping to shock Karen with Martin’s shocking age, as Liam had shocked her.
But Karen only said, “She does. That’s why we’re not hanging out at my house anymore.” With that Karen turned her back and crossed the lawn.
As soon as Karen had passed out of sight Sarah clambered out of the car on the curb side, averting her gaze from David’s car as if it would blind her to actually see it. She stood so near the hood of David’s car she could have laid her palm on it. She was seized with the wild conviction that David was sitting in his car, just an arm’s length away, watching her, and that this had been the reason for Karen’s cold gaze. Then Sarah understood that it wasn’t just David sitting in David’s car, watching her, but David and the new girl who rode in the passenger seat. English Lilly, ambient gossip reported. David and Lilly sat quietly watching Sarah smote by the thought of David’s car, unable to even look at it—Sarah wheeled on them, her lips compressed in scorn. The car was empty. As if she’d meant to all along, Sarah pulled the door to David’s car open and slipped inside. He never locked it; locking it would suggest that he might care about it. The car, once so clean and new-smelling, was now a squalid vessel for abuse. The passenger seat and footwell were heaped with books and refuse, empty bottles, empty cigarette packs, the twisted wraiths of soiled cotton T-shirts. The pull-out ashtray overflowed and propagated smears of gray, foul ash in every direction. The car phone lay strangled in its cord, its light-up buttons extinguished. Until recently, Sarah knew, that phone had worked. David had boasted so much about it, handing out the number to so many people, even Sarah had learned what it was. It had been a schoolwide pastime to call David’s car. The phone appeared to have been beaten to death perhaps against the cracked dashboard. The one time Sarah rode in the car, its interior hadn’t even been marked by a boy’s carelessness. Now it overflowed with a grown man’s despair. Sarah reached for the seat lever and lowered the seat all the way, and herself. The hushed night disappeared from view and she saw only the interior skin of this filthy armor of the boy she had loved.
Her face pressed into one of the leather seat’s stitched crevices, she crushed her fist in the vise of her thighs, the car so vibrating with her lust, or her grief, its movement should have been visible from the outside. But, “Sarah?” called Liam’s slightly too high-pitched voice, trailing off forlornly. He would be somewhere near the front of the house, seeing Karen’s gaping convertible, top down and obviously empty, and David’s car, also apparently empty. Surely he would not cross the lawn to make sure Sarah wasn’t crushing her clitoris over a white-knuckled fist in the passenger seat of her ex-boyfriend’s car, in the hope of the sort of orgasm that feels like one’s pleasure torn out by the root: a punishment for the pleasure as well as a final end of it.
Still Sarah froze, heart racing in her chest, skull, and crotch. The scent of her lonely exertion wound into the car like an unwilled and shameful secretion, fear’s trickle of urine or mystery’s trickle of blood from the nose.
He didn’t call her name again. A muffled sound, perhaps the door closing again, and then silence. David’s car’s clock said 7:42. When it said 7:48 Sarah raised the seat back to its previous position and left the car as if leaving the scene of a crime.
Mr. Kingsley’s front door was unlocked. No Liam or anyone else stood in Mr. Kingsley’s foyer, with its terra-cotta tiles and its bizarre human-size doll that was supposed to be called a “soft sculpture” and its rusty Mobil sign, with a winged horse, ostentatiously hung underneath its own spotlight. Quickly Sarah took the front stairs to the second-floor hall, the plushly carpeted one lined with posters and photos; she locked herself into the bathroom, washed her hands and her face, and redid her eyeliner and lipstick. When she came out again, there was Liam at the end of the hall, standing in an attitude of indecision. He seemed to be slightly tipped forward, hands dangling at his sides, wrists too long for the sleeves. This impression of infirmity passed when he saw her, and once again he looked handsome and young and his striking eyes flashed with charisma.
“You’re mysterious, aren’t you!”
“I went to buy smokes,” she lied.
The smile remained on Liam’s face but now it had been there too long. He was acting, she realized, and wanting direction but not getting it. This was the strange quality that hung around his handsomeness, a blur or a warp where he seemed to be lagging behind his own actions and wondering how they had gone.
“Isn’t this house crazy?” she offered.
His gratitude seemed to cohere him. “It’s a bloody fucking castle, isn’t it! Let’s hide—I hear the others.” Grabbing her hand he hauled her up the steep attic stairs—half serious, as if their lives depended on it, half ridiculous, as if “let’s hide” were an improv they’d just been assigned. The gleamingly beautiful attic room Sarah remembered from the night she’d discovered Manuel was now as squalid as—what? It took her a moment to understand the familiarity of the squalor. The room was as squalid as David’s car which she had just left. The stately expanse of the varnished floor, the expensive charm of the low-angled ceiling and dormers, were made unrecognizable by trailing heaps of pungent laundry, scudding piles of takeout garbage, countless fallen soldiers of the armies of Miller and Coors. Retaining her hand Liam pulled her through the cluttered filth with no more compunction than a goat would show crossing its native terrain. Then they were standing at the window on the far side of the room next to one of the beds. Letting go her hand, Liam opened the window with exaggerated care, making almost no sound, and cupped a hand by his ear to indicate that they were eavesdropping. A murmur of voices entered with the damp evening air: composite talk and laughter, muffled by distance and leaves. A party concealed in the manicured jungle of Mr. Kingsley’s backyard. From the height of the attic the party’s constituent parts, its outlines, its individual words were as impossible to parse as were the individual leaves of all the shrubs and trees that loosely filled the air outside the window like a mound of black feathers. Peering out Sarah could see, here and there, bright glints from the small outdoor lights. They disappeared, then flashed again, whether from the movement of the breeze through
the leaves, or from the movements of people, she didn’t know. And then David’s voice reached her, as clearly as if he and not Liam were standing beside her. David’s low, sardonic voice made some sort of wisecrack, was answered by jagged laughter. In the instant of hearing his voice Sarah’s chest seemed to fill with the same feathered darkness into which she was gazing: a mass crushing and weightless of pain and desire. Across that distance she hadn’t deciphered the words he had spoken, yet it took her an instant to realize she hadn’t; his voice by itself seemed so sharp she had almost flinched from it.
“Everybody’s outside,” Liam said. “All our lot, and David.” After a moment he added, “He used to be your boyfriend—or was he just having us on?”
Her mouth was too dry to speak comfortably. “He wasn’t ever my boyfriend.”
“But he fancied you?”
“I don’t know.”
“’Course he did.”
Stupidly she blurted, before thinking, “Why.” Now he would think she wanted compliments from him, when what she’d literally meant was why did David love me—which was the cowardly way to ask David, Why do you no longer love me? Of course Liam, in speaking to her, assumed she was speaking to him.
“Because you’re lovely, that’s why.” He delivered the line beautifully, and a thrill rippled over her surface, in the depths of which David continued to lurk, the unanswered question.
“Stop,” she said, wincing.
“You are. So. Lovely. D’you know who you remind me of?” he exclaimed, as if finally solving a conundrum. “Sade. D’you know who that is?”
“I don’t look like her.”
“You do,” Liam said, feasting his eyes on her face until he seemed to embarrass himself. He broke off, and reaching outside the open window, brought in a saucer of cigarette butts. After patting himself all over, he produced a packet of Drum and papers, and sat down on the bed. “Fancy a ciggie?”